The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in the present disclosure and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Some user equipment (“UE”) may be used primarily or exclusively for communication with other UE or computing devices, with little or no human intervention. Examples of such UE may include wireless weather sensors, assembly line sensors, meters to track vehicles of a fleet, and so forth. In many cases these devices may log onto a wireless network and communicate with a network server, e.g., over the Internet. In the parlance of the 3GPP Long Term Evolution (“LTE”) Release 10 (March 2011) (the “LTE Standard”), such communications may be referred to as machine-type communication (“MTC”). In the parlance of the IEEE 802.16 standard, IEEE Std. 802.16-2009, published May 29, 2009 (“WiMAX”), such communications may be referred to as machine-to-machine (“M2M”) communications.
UE that communicates primarily or exclusively with other computing devices or UE using MTC may generate very little user plane traffic. In many cases, that traffic may be treated as low priority. However, as the number of MTC UE increases, the overall volume of communications may nonetheless overload a network. Maintaining connection of such a large number of MTC UEs without impacting other (e.g., cell phone) traffic may be difficult.